Presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, May 30–June 3, 2008, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Abstract

Background

Using a large data set, we investigated the impact of the number of resected and involved lymph nodes on overall survival for patients with esophageal cancer.

Methods

From the National Oncology Database™, esophageal cancer cases with data available on the total number of resected and involved nodes as well as other variables were evaluated as it relates to overall survival by multivariate analysis using Cox proportional hazards method. Patients with 0, exactly 1 or 1–3 positive nodes were separately studied to determine the association between the number of lymph nodes resected and overall survival.